Classic English Literature Notes

Modern English Drama

               The glorious days of the Elizabethan drama were followed by a long period of decline and eclipse. The post-Elizabethan vainly endeavored to capture the graces of Shakespeare and other illustrious predecessors, while the heroic tragedies and the comedy of love and intrigue during the Restoration hardly added any glorious chapter to the history of English dramatic literature. Goldsmith and Sheridan attempted a partial revival in the eighteenth century, but their sporadic brilliance was followed by a spell of darkness which spread for almost a century, for between 1779, the year of the performance of Sheridan’s last important play, and 1876 when Pinero’s first play was staged, English drama was practically barren. The later eighteenth century witnessed the rise of great actors but not great playwrights. And it is an accepted rule that when acting flourishes drama languishes. Melodramatic, sensational and unrealistic plays alone were popular. A play was written not with a view to depicting life and character but for providing sufficient scope for the lusty lungs of the declamatory actor. Play writing was done mostly by hack writers, who sacrificed both art and realism in trying to eke out a living by writing to the dictates of theatre managers, producers and actors.

                  English drama was at very low ebb when T.W. Robertson, a playwright and actor, appeared on the scene, fully alive to the lack of realism and low artistic tone of the drama of his day he determined to import realism into drama and raise its artistic level. The year 1865, which witnessed the performance of his play. Society, proved a landmark in the revival of the English stage. The revival manifested itself in stress on realism both in subject matter and technique. In place of types and stock characters Robertson presented individual men and women, person of flesh and blood. In the matter of technique and form he discarded blank verse and rhetoric in favor of natural and human speech. Robertson however was not a bold or revolutionary spirit and he could not divest himself of the old traditions, such as romantic melodrama. He, therefore, failed to exercise any substantial influence on his contemporaries and the much needed reform in drama required a more daring literary genius.

                    The darling genius was found, to some extent, in Arthur Wing Pioner and H. A. Jones who made pretty serious efforts to drive away undiluted romanticism from the English stage. An expert craftsman Pinero had the courage to introduce several innovations in dramatic technique. In his The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, produced in 1893, he played the pioneer in discarding the ‘soliloquy’ and the ‘aside’ along with certain other old stage conventions, thus bringing drama closer to life. Pinero and Jones, however, he could not be sufficiently darling to ignore bublic taste altogether. Though Jones wrote in his preface to Saints and Sinner (1884) that playwriting should not be merely the art of sensational and spectacular illusion but mainly and chiefly the art of representing English life, he could not avoid, in his plays, theatrical excitement and too much use of coincidence just to humor the audience. Hence, the realism of these, dramatists was skin deep not the genuine stuff which subsequent playwrights were to provide.

                  The person who infused real new revolutionary blood into English drama was Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright. He was introduced to English audiences by J. T. Grein, a Dutchman, in 1890. In England, William Archer, the famous dramatic critic, enthusiastically espoused Ibsen’s cause. Through Ibsen’s genuine realism was introduced in English plays, Ibsen’s characters are drawn from ordinary life and characterization in his plays receives more attention than the patching up of a well-knit plot. Moreover, the plot in his plays is essentially psychological leaving little room for pure action or incident. The Ibsenion play is essentially a drama of ideas, of characters swayed with ideas and struggling against the forces of convention and society. Ibsen’s ideas gave a rude shock to the susceptibilities of his contemporaries, but he was bold enough to stick to his theories and technique. Consequently, he exercised a great influence all over the continent and the drama of ideas of revolt against society and convention came to stay. The tyranny of the star system and the stranglehold of the commercial minded theater managers could do no longer throttle true dramatic art.  The renaissance of modern drama was in full swing with the advent of Ibsen.

                 If William Archer propagated the plays of Ibsen, it was Shaw who imported the real Ibsen spirit into English Drama. Highly original and independent in many ways, Shaw was immensely influenced by the plays of Ibsen and, like him, he became a champion of conferring the new freedom of subject-matter and technique on English drama. Since the appearance of his first play Widowers Houses in 1892, Shaw strode on the English stage like a versatile Titan almost till the end of his days. Among modern English dramatists, he proved the most zealous advocate o f rationalism and realism, brushing aside Victorian cobwebs, a proper climate for a drama of ideas, englarging the dramatists vision and, above all, slowly forging an appreciative and responsive intellectual audience for his problems plays. The volume of his dramatic production is so wide and varied that it is not possible within this limited space to do justice to the great services which he rendered to British drama. His Arms and the Mans, Candida, Man Superman Saint Joan, to mention only some of his best plays, brought English drama again into its own and provided inspiration and guidance to other playwright.

                  “I always have to preach”, observed Shaw. “My plays all have a purpose.” The plays of Shaw are inspired by a conscious iconoclastic Galsworthy___the two other great luminaries in the firmament of modern drama___gave a version of realism in their work, which has no touch of the partisan spirit or the zeal of the propagandist. Their realism has been described as naturalism i.e. an attempt to present “both fair and foul, no more no less.” The naturalistic play is intended to be objective and impersonal, though both Galsworthy and Barker could not be absolutely dispassionate. Both were revolutionaries in their own way. Barker revolting against the tyranny of Victorian convention over the individual, and Galsworthy against the heartless but mighty social forces which crush the individual. Barker expounds the ideal of self-realization, which Galsworthy strives to make out a case for tolerance and mutual understanding and accommodation.

                  Shaw’s realism and the naturalism of Barker and Galsworthy have to be distinguished further. Shaw is essentially an intellectual, cold, penetrating, satirical, often flippant, but the latter have nothing of the imp or the mountebank in them. Moreover they do not banish emotion from their plays. Shaw is essentially a talker and his plays about in discussion and a display of with but both Galsworthy and Barker subordinate sheer with and talk to the possibilities of life and the strong undercurrent of emotion which eventually sways human life. Both deal with problems, mostly social in character, but despite all his legal training, Galsworthy is the more didactic of the two. Whereas Galsworthy tries to rub his moral home. Barker leaves the public to drawits own moral. Nevertheless, in all his best plays___Strife, Justice, The Skin Game, Loyalties___Galsworthy shows himself at once a great  artist and a great critic of society, far more balanced, reserved and impartial than Shaw.

                   The popularity of realism and naturalism did not oust the romantic element altogether from the domain of modern drama. Realism stimulates the brain but a touch of romanticism vivifies the heart. “The lies of romance relieve the tedium of everyday life.” It was  J. M. Barrie, a Scottish novelist, who provided the lies of romance by turning his face away from drab and cruel reality. He found solace in magic isles and imaginary dream islands, Gifted with a child’s fancy and make-belief, he was at best with children. And it is a children’s play, Peter Pane (1904) in which he is at his best. Among his other plays, mention may be made of Quality Street (1903), which centers round a sweet love story full of his peculiar charm, humor and pathos, smiles and tears.  The Admirable Circhton,  what Every Woman Knows,  Dear Brutus, Mary Rose  are all plays for removed from realism, presenting impossible characters, who behave impossibly. Barrie created a new type of play, which can best be described as “Barriesque”, a blending of romance, whimsicality and quaintness. A perfect master of technique, he produced plays which despite all their fantasy and romance, are compact and well-knit. Summing up his contribution to modern drama, Lynton Hudson observes: “In an age of growing cynicism he guarded the guttering flame of Romance and kept it from being quenched by intellectualism.” 

                 No account of modern British drama can be complete without a reference to the Irish Movement and the Provincial Repertory Movement. The new Irish Theater was founded  in 1892 by a group of prominent Irish writers with W. B. Yeats at their head. Later on, Miss, A. E. Horniman, a wealthy English woman, joined this group of writers and provided funds with which the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, was constructed.

               The Irish Movement, also know as Celtic Revival, was essentially national in character, and concentrated on Irish themes and ideas. It also aimed at reforming the stage and turning it into a thing of beauty. The movement, however, was not intended to espouse the cause of realism or naturalism. Lynton Hudson, describing this aspect to the movement, observes: “It did not think of a play as either a sermon or a debate, not as intellectual at all as appealing primarily to the brain. It was not intended to make people think, but to make them feel to give them an emotional and spiritual uplifting such as they might experience at mass in a cathedral or at the performace of a symphony.”

                   Owing to these aims and ideals the Irish playwright turned to the past of their country, its myths and legends. In a sense, their approach was romantic and poetical. In his plays, Yeats glorified the national myths and legends and depicted primitive human emotions. Essentially a poet, he gave beautiful ideas and first-rate lyrical poetry but failed in characterization and plot construction. His contribution to drama lies essentially in the realism of poetry and symbolism.

                    The Irish Movement also inspired a new type of native comedy drawing its inspiration from Irish folk-lore and Irish peasantry. The best exponent of this comedy was the talented J. M. Synge (1871-1909), whom Yeats discovered in Paris, wasting his genius as a journalist, Synge drew his inspiration largely from the simple fishermen of the Aran Isles. There he saw human nature both at its best and at its worst. He also picked up the native speed and picturesque idiom of these people. Synge’s best comedies are in the Shadow of the Glen, the Tinker’s Wedding and particularly The Playboy of the Western World. The last was at once recognized to be his masterpiece after its performance at the London Theater in 1907.  Synge also wrote a few tragedies, the best of which in Riders to the Sea (1904).

                         Synge wrote six plays. His dramatic work is limited but it is of such a high order that his place in British drama is assured for all times to come. “Synge had, like Shakespeare,” writes Hudson, “not only a sure dramatic instinct and a keen insight into the motive forces of human character, but also the gift of transmuting pathos and ugliness into poetry and beauty, and the exuberance inseparable from all great geniuses. Like Shakespeare, he never moralizes, he is a dramatist pure and simple. He had no sympathy with the didactic school of drama.”

                      Miss Horniman, who had financed the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, also found money to start a repertory theatre in Manchester in 1907. Since then the provincial repertory theatre has played a significant role in both English and American drama. It became the chief centre for producing talented playwrights and actors. Other theatres notably the Liverpool Playhouse (1911), slowly came into existence. Unlike the Irish Theatre, the Manchester and other English theatres were not intended to arouse or revive local nationalism, nor were they inspired by the poetic and symbolic aspects of life. Their drama was highly realistic and intellectual__in line with the work of Ibsen and Shaw. It did much to popularize the drama of idea and represent the social life both of the rich and the poor of the highly industrialized towns of Manchester and Birmingham. This drama was, of course, naturalistic and photographic but a bit too serious, even grim. “A night in a repertory theatre”, wrote St. John Ervine, “was almost as cheerful as a night in a morgue. People went to repertory theatres as some Dissenters formerly went to chapel, woebegonely and as if they came to atone for lamentable sins.”

                    An important phase of modern drama is found in the revival of the poetic drama along side of the naturalistic and realistic plays. The plays of Yeats were poetic to a certain extent but the Irish Theatre eventually drifted from poetry towards realism. In England poetic drama found its first exponent in Stephen Philiphs, whose blank verse plays enjoyed considerable popularity in the first years of the century. Stephen Philips possessed considerable dramatic genius, but his poetic talent was not equally high. So he failed to work a revival of poetic drama.

                 It were John Drink water and John Mansfield who brought about the actual revival of poetic drama. Drinkwater did not attempt to write in blank verse and thus escaped comparison with the great Shakespeare. He produced four poetic plays, but used both prose and verse in them. Finally he gave up poetic drama altogether and wrote only in prose. Finally he gave up poetic drama altogether and wrote only in prose. His masterpiece is  Abraham Lincoln a play on the life of the American president. His other plays___Cramwell and Mary Stuart__are also historical, but they didn’t __come up to the level of Abraham Lincoln.

                Masefield chose at first biblical or historical subjects and experimented with various lyric metres, including the rhymed couplet, but he finally evolved a poetic idiom in prose like Wordsworth’s like Synge, he forged a new pattern of rhythmic speech, terse, figurative and rooted in the soil. His characters are simple, rustic folk. His best play is The Tragedy of Nan which presents a picture of rustic cruelty, though it is not without a certain element of tragic grandeur. The play though written in prose is essentially poetic.

                Among other exponents of poetic drama John Flecker, with his oriental play Hassan, deserves special mention. It is written in highly colored prose, but it is, like Masefield’s Nan steeped in the spirit of poetry. Lawrence Binyon, Lord Dunsany, Gordromon Bottomley and T.S.Eliot have also attempted poetic drama. T.S. Eliot’s Murder in The Cathederal has proved a success, but the plays of the others have failed to elicit much appreciation.

                   There are some of the main tendencies and types of modern drama. Though the momentum of dramatic revival has not kept up a uniform pace during the century its future is not dark. What it will be in they ears to come is not altogether impossible to visualize. “One can only guess what form the new drama will assume when it eventually finds its equilibrium.” Priestly is not alone in thinking that it will be more closely allied with music and the ballet. One thing is sure: it must recover some of the things that it has lost, the obvious beauties of romance and poetry. It may be, as Galsworthy predicted, lyrical, and its province to describe the elemental soul of man and forces of Nature with beauty ad the spirit of discovery. It will most likely to be a swing-back of the pendulum that oscillates eternally between Romance and Realism. The fallacy of Realism, as James Branch Cabell has put it, “is that it assumes our mileposts to be as worthy of consideration as our goal: and that the especial post we are now passing reveals an eternal verity.”